When Does Content Marketing Become Native Advertising?

Posted on October 04, 2013

SOURCE: The Atlantic

Ahead of Saturday’s World Teacher’s Day, we have our own Ogilvy teachers, senior leaders in our digital practice, revisiting social and digital media basics. In the first part of this series, Vice President of Content Strategy at Social@Ogilvy Washington D.C. Matthew Greenberg discusses Native Advertising.

There are a lot of interesting issues around native advertising worthy of debate, but the one that seems to garner the most disagreement these days is the argument about just what native advertising is — and even what to call it…

Over at Forbes.com, head honcho Lewis D’Vorkin says that much of what generally is called native advertising is really “native content” — aka content marketing.

But the debate about native advertising — what to call it, how to produce it and where to display it — misses the big picture.

The pendulum is swinging back to marketers. As D’Vorkin points out, at the dawn of the 20th Century, marketers routinely created content marketing — from John Deere’s “The Furrow” to Maxwell House’s Passover haggadahs — and were able to do so because consumers trusted the value of the content.

That opportunity is back with us — and publishers are now opening up their doors and their platforms and asking us to help them provide value for their audience. The ball is in our court.